Emily Brisse

    Another installment of Name-That-Plant-Growing-in-the-Marsh: Bittersweet nightshade Eastern daisy fleabane (aster family) Some kind of lovely leaf -- who knows what this is??? Daisy Creeping bellflower ? ? Some kind of grass ??? Motherwort Clover ? Common mullein My boy, out in it all Quite a few plants I couldn't identify this month, folks, so I need your help. What did I get right? What did I miss? Goodness, this world is a wild and beautiful place.

    For those of you who have been here since the very beginning of Landing on Cloudy Water, you might remember my early attempts to learn and document the names of what I saw growing around me. First there was the snowdrop , then the Siberian squill , then the forsythia , then the tarda tulip , and finally the wild columbine. Well, a child came into my life a bit after all that, and naming him, I suppose, claimed my attention. I am happy to say, though, that he is now at the age where he wants to know what he's seeing, and that has given me new cause to do the same. So, I bring you yet again, a series in wild identification: Plant Literate! (Although I seem to be always a month behind, and have no time for individual posts, so it will most likely happen in bursts. Ah, well. Better something than nothing, is my current motto.) This is a doubly-sweet endeavor because what I've been learning these past months has been focused on the growing ...

Good morning, (And an early morning it is.) Last spring I could blame these sleepless a.m. hours on the turkeys roosting in the trees outside my window, but now I only have my swirling mind to point to. These are some of the things I would like/need to do, possibly today: transplant several hostas, dig up and move a good many big rocks, water the rudbeckia, move the shelves in the garage, organize the garage (!), call the insurance company, clip the little guy's fingernails, keep writing that essay, start writing college recommendations, finish rereading The Glass Castle, and oh (!) take in that sunrise. That list will be a starting point, anyway. And much of it will keep me outside, in the air that has already taken on a hint of autumn.  It's an exciting time of year, friends. Often stressful. But so very full of a pulsing, thrumming, chirping, calling, rushing, crunching, thrusting kind of life. Summer, as always, was a sweet reprieve where instead of teaching I spent ...

Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie, On the Banks  of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake . Is it any wonder that with childhood books like these I've developed a proclivity for place-centered literature? Over Memorial Day weekend, my mother accompanied me to Walnut Grove in southwestern Minnesota for a very specific purpose: to visit the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum . I would have gone with no one but her. She read all the Little House  books to me when I was a child, and some of my most vivid memories from my single-digit years are a concoction of her voice, the inevitable (if imagined) winds off the prairie, the quilt my mother and I were often cozied under, and Laura's flapping bonnet. To say I loved these books is an understatement. They were one of my earliest experiences of living vicariously through the lives of others, of traveling through words. The museum itself is not much--lots of books and souvenirs and several replicated late-180...

For the uninitiated, prairies call to mind only a few colors: green, yellow, brown--or some mix of the three. In actuality, though, the myriad wildflowers found amid the grasses and on their edges are multi-hued and brilliant, deserving of all the second-looks they inspire. Say hello to the wild columbine. My mother and I guessed honeysuckle first, as its little bell-flowers hang similiarly and smell just as sweet. But later we were corrected, and happily so. I would have hated to miss out on details like this: boiled, it can be used for hair wash; and crushed, its seeds can be rubbed on palms as love potion. Why not? You'd certainly smell delightful. The wild columbine is my fifth Thirty Before Thirty plant, and I must say I've adored this part of my list. I've paid so much more attention this spring, reallyreally slowed down and looked and examined and sniffed and listened. List or not, blog or not, I think I've found a hobby I will enjoy for...

"When you pray with this pipe, you pray for and with everything." -- Black Elk   I can promise you one thing: when my brother and I, as children, careened around the Pipestone National Monument 's Circle Trail ( through prairie, over rocks, up cliffs, down ledges, through prairie ), we were not thinking about prayer. And we certainly didn’t whisper. The sacredness of the place never crossed our minds. Our parents were from Pipestone, the small southwestern Minnesota town where the monument resides, and the park seemed as much our backyard playground as it had once been theirs. Besides, we were eight and five, and it was just cool to climb stuff. But when I was older—twelve, maybe—I was given my first pair of dangling, red pipestone earrings, carved into the shape of leaves, and later—at fifteen?—I received a small ceremonial pipe. There were conversations surrounding these gifts, explanations of how the pipestone was quarried from the earth, how it had been ...

Nothing gets me like a nice day's walk through wooded hills, so when I took my first true-spring tour around the Lowry Nature Center acreage last Friday, I was beside myself with delight. Have you been here? If you're a southwestern Minneapolis metro dweller and you just shook your head no, you have a drive to make, friend, and a set of trails to explore. I mean it. As a part of the Carver Park Reserve and Three Rivers Park District, the Lowry Nature Center's 250 acres include eight miles of trails, habitats that vary from hardwood forests to tamarack bogs, and a diverse array of wildlife. During my afternoon walk, I was most impressed by the birds. At one point--after I sat down beside a sunny pond and was quiet--I had a white crane fishing for dinner on my left, two Canadian geese touching beaks on my right, five wood ducks flitting nervously atop the water, any number of marsh wrens and black-capped chickadees leaping from one limb to the next behind me, and a red-w...

Here is one of my sixty before sixty goals: to have someone name a flowering plant Foremily. When I was two I would have been drawn to forsythia. Always, always, always I have loved effusions of blossoms. They transport me somewhere magical, and it's an especially potent trip here in Minnesota because these colorful displays come off of months of white. But I've never known it's name. Never known anything about it except for it's beauty. Now I know these things: this variety is called the Northern Sun, it was introduced by the U of M specifically for colder climate cultivation in 1982, and it's thriving here now, in spite of those 30' nights. Also, I know that someday I will plant one or ten of these in my yard, and herald its spring blooms with my whole heart.